Maximizing Your Firm’s Visibility with Local Search

Visibility is key for keeping lawyers and law firms competitive in online legal marketing. As the Senior Director supporting LexisNexis’ cutting-edge, web-based marketing solutions, my job is to ensure that prospective clients can find the right lawyers and law firms whenever and where ever they are searching online. It’s really exciting to be a part of the growth engine of online marketing at LexisNexis, where we are constantly innovating to deliver more value to our clients. What is particularly rewarding is that LexisNexis is singularly focused on the legal vertical, and dedicated to helping people in need of legal support find the right representation. Since 65% of people begin their legal search online, we strive to develop the tools to help maximize your firm’s visibility.

What’s next in online legal marketing? Though the way people find lawyers online and the tools they use to do so are changing every day, one development merits a closer look. The evolution—or some might say revolution—major search engines are making toward prominently featuring local information when returning organic or natural (unpaid) search results.

Imagine how effective local search can be with this scenario:

Sitting in her home in Glen Ridge, N.J., Jane visits a search engine and types in “family lawyer.” The search engine is able to identify her location and returns results at the top of the page, usually with a map, of family lawyers in the Glen Ridge area. Now despite the fact that Jane never specified her location in her search, she now has valuable, personalized listings at her fingertips.

How does this happen? The search engines now assume that people prefer results that are locally based. By applying evolving algorithms based on Jane’s location, the search engine now produces results for Glen Ridge, N.J.-area lawyers and law firms.

What does this mean for you and your law firm? It means that to remain competitive and increase the probability that your firm is served up high in results, you must take action today to keep up with this evolving approach in search engine marketing. Very few firms are employing this strategy properly simply because they don’t have the resources or the expertise to become a search engine guru and keep up with the ever-changing world of online marketing.

At LexisNexis, we have the most advanced products to capitalize on the rapidly developing area of online marketing. Combining more than 150 years of legal marketing expertise with our experienced teams’ breadth of knowledge in both SEO and legal, we stay on top of the latest trends and will take steps continually to improve your visibility. We want you to spend your time practicing law, that’s why we are expanding our comprehensive solutions with the addition of our new Local Visibility search engine optimization (SEO) service—the first of its kind offered by providers in the legal market.

With Local Visibility, our dedicated SEO team members actively create new online profiles for your firm and take all the appropriate technical steps behind the scenes so that your firm can be found locally.

Local Visibility complements your firm’s profile information appearing on our sites Lawyers.comsm and martindale.com® which receive over 3M visits monthly, and the recently released Web Visibility Services that broadly build your online presence and position your website to deliver qualified traffic that converts to business.

Local search optimization is one the greatest tools for increasing visibility via online legal marketing campaigns. We are constantly evolving and enhancing our products to better serve your needs. We welcome your feedback, ideas and suggestions about how LexisNexis can further assist you in meeting your marketing goals.

Thanks for posting your comments. We are always eager to hear back from our users.

I am surprised to see you got back only 19 results as we have many more law firms that match your criteria. Based on your search criteria (Practice Area=Intellectual Property, State=New York), I did a search at http://www.martindale.com/Find-Lawyers-and-Law-Firms.aspx and got back 676 law firms. Are you using Advanced Search form or our Single search bar feature on the top? If you are using single search bar, can you tell me exactly what you are typing in there?

Hi Andrew,
I’ve been trying to look up law firms on Martindale, but I have been receiving very limited results. For example, a search for ‘intellectual property’ law firms of all sizes in New York gives me 19 firms. I find this very hard to believe, especially since when I conducted a similar search last November, the results were much different. Can you or someone on the staff explain these changes? Thank you!